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Plastiki

March 22, 2011

National Geographic Explorer David de Rothschild pictured aboard the Plastiki, a boat made of post-consumer plastic bottles which embarked on a voyage from San Francisco to Sydney one year ago yesterday. The expedition made de Rothschild one of our 2010 Adventurers of the Year.

Op-ed by David de Rothschild; Photograph courtesy of Adventure Ecology

If you type the phrase "how long can you last without" into Google, given the thousands of preemptive suggestions to fire back to complete the phrase, it might surprise you that "water" is the first word to bubble up and claim top spot. Scan the first few pages of the 159,000,000 search results and you’re presented with a collection of near identical survival websites focused on tips needed to keep your personal water tank from dipping dipping into the red.

But amid all the reams of cut-and-paste references, one particular tip caught my eye. It was a sentence that could easily win the award for most obvious statement of 2011: "The best method to survive without water is not to be placed in that situation in the first place."

December 17, 2010

Each day we will feature one of the 2010 Adventures of the Year here on our blog. Get to know them all in our photo gallery, then vote for your favorite for the People's Choice award—every day. You can even vote for a new favorite each day, if you can't pick just one. Photograph by Court Mast

The Voyager

David de Rothschild journeyed across the Pacific in a 60-foot sailboat made of 12,500 plastic bottles.

Four years ago, David de Rothschild announced he would sail across the Pacific in a boat made entirely out of intact, recycled plastic bottles. He would call it Plastiki, after Thor Heyerdahl’s legendary balsa-wood raft, Kon-Tiki. The raft and the journey would call attention to the overwhelming amount of plastics clogging our seas. At 30, de Rothschild had already crossed Antarctica and led an expedition through the Ecuadorian Amazon. He was the youngest Briton ever to visit both North and South Poles, the heir to a European banking fortune, and a 2007 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. But his latest plan sounded slightly ludicrous and, after early models of the hull failed to hold together, increasingly dangerous.

He was going to set sail in winter 2008—cyclone season—then summer, 2009. Still the hull wouldn’t hold. An entirely new method of welding plastic was invented. Skepticism abounded. Reporters asked him if he was ever actually leaving. And if so, when? De Rothschild smiled and deflected the criticism with self-deprecation, pointing out that, even if they did get underway, even though he had been on plenty of expeditions before, he hadn’t any sea legs to speak of. “I get sick in the bathtub,” he told them.

Then, somehow, in the spring of 2010, Plastiki sailed from the California coast and into the Pacific. On July 26, 2010, after four months and roughly 9,500 miles, de Rothschild and his crew—including skippers Jo Royle and Dave Thomson, and Heyerdahl’s grandson, Olav—sailed into Sydney Harbor, their remarkable, sustainable, ecological-minded ocean crossing complete. —By Ryan Bradley

July 26, 2010

After sailing more than 8,000 nautical miles and spending 128 days crossing the Pacific in a boat made of 12,500 plastic PET bottles, the Plastiki expedition and her crew have safely and successfully reached their planned destination of Sydney to cheers of welcome and support.We'll have an exclusive interview with David de Rothschild in the next day or so. Until then, feast your eyes on these arrival photos!

March 22, 2010

Just in time for World Water Day (today) and after nearly four years of development, eco-adventurer David de Rothschild has launched his most ambitious expedition yet. The Plastiki, an innovative catamaran made from 12,000 post-consumer plastic bottles,set sail on Saturday for a 100-day voyage from San Francisco to Sydney. Their mission is to witness some of the most devastating waste accumulation on our planet, including the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. According to his twitter feed, David and the crew had eggs for breakfast on their first morning at sea. (Read our previous coverage and see the NG Plastiki site.)

Taking inspiration from Thor Heyerdal's 1947 Kon-tiki expedition, the Plastiki's crew includes of David
de Rothschild, accomplished skipper Jo Royle, and Olav Heyerdahl, Thor's grandson. Check back for updates here, or go to http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/plastiki/.

December 03, 2009

And the award for green cause of the year goes to . . . the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. After decades of anonymity, the floating trash pile located midway between California and Hawaii had a breakout 2009—luring news crews, a trio aboard a raft made of junk, a zero-impact rower, and some hipsters from Vice magazine. Oh, and it was featured on Oprah. But most of the coverage (even you, Oprah) failed to ask one rather important question: Now that we know it’s out there, what do we do about it?

March 26, 2009

The view from Pier 31 makes a pretty good case for those who would argue that San Francisco is the world’s most beautiful city. To the east, the Bay Bridge connects the city to Treasure Island and beyond; Alcatraz, a prison as stunning as it was notorious, sits in the middle of the bay; and Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid cast long shadows over San Francisco’s famous hills. From the roof, you could probably see the Golden Gate Bridge.

So it’s almost offensive that in a city with property values like San Francisco's, a massive pier with multi-million-dollar views could sit more or less empty, but alas that’s how de Rothschild found it when he chose San Francisco as his launching point.

The city, says de Rothschild, was a logical home for the Plastiki. “San Francisco is a very progressive city. It has banned plastic bags and has shown a great deal of support for the values that we are trying to represent.”

As with every aspect of the project, de Rothschild faced challenges getting the space. The Port Commission greeted his initial overture with incredulity. It’s not every day that a swashbuckling banking heir requests a space in bay-front property to build a boat out of trash. But thanks to de Rothschild’s unmistakable sense of purpose and support from Mayor Gavin Newsom, the doors, quite literally, opened.

When I stroll in on a gorgeous day in early January, however, the problem folks seem most concerned about is a door that won’t close.

One of the pier’s 30-foot-tall metal roll-up doors is jammed. After a few futile efforts tugging on the door chain, the guys from 1-800-GOT-JUNK hop on the hood of their truck and start banging the door with a sledgehammer.

Despite de Rothschild’s blue-blood lineage and his luxury watch sponsor, this feels like a guerilla operation. At this point, there’s no formal office space, so Adventure Ecology Event Manager Kevin Williams sits on a folding chair next to a browning Christmas tree at the “command center,” the dusty corner of a concrete support pillar where the telephone and modem reside.

The 20-foot Plastiki prototype hangs from the ceiling. “We tested that in the Bay,” de Rothschild explains, “and it performed better than anyone anticipated. We got up to eight knots.”

Every success is hard earned, happily embraced, and quickly followed by yet another challenge. The project sometimes suffers from a shortage of plastic bottles, which will compose the catamaran’s twin hulls.

“We’re waiting for another shipment,” says de Rothschild. “We’re having a lot of problems with that.”

“We’re having a lot of problems in general,” quips Expedition Coordinator Matthew Grey.

The door, however, ceases to fall into that category. After ten minutes of hammering and yanking, the guys finally clang it shut, and everyone gets back to work.

David de Rothschild, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and founder of Adventure Ecology, will depart in Spring 2009 on a 11,000-mile voyage from San Francisco to Sydney (see the route map) in a boat made of plastic bottles. Find out more about the expedition in a feature article by Contributing Editor Paul Kvinta ("Voyage of the Plastiki," October 2008 issue of ADVENTURE). Check in here for updates.

March 16, 2009

Once you move past the fact that they both float, two-liter plastic bottles and sailboats share little in common. To David de Rothschild, this is good news. To his boat builder, Mike Rose, it is not. (Read previous dispatches >>)

When de Rothschild began toying with the idea in 2006 of turning a voyage to the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch into a television documentary, he ran the idea by his buddy, philanthropist and former eBay president Jeff Skoll. Skoll liked the idea, de Rothschild says, but he kept coming back to one concern: where’s the drama?

“‘I mean you’re out there, on a boat, taking trash out of the ocean,’ de Rothschild recalls Skoll saying, ‘and that’s an interesting thing. But where’s the drama?’ I thought that was a good point.”

Which brings us to plastic bottles.

They litter the back end of San Francisco's cavernous Pier 31, HQ for the Plastiki operations. Some are displayed as a wall of art, some sit in a large fish net hanging from the ceiling as future building materials, and some are piled about in their most common incarnation, as trash.

“Bottled water has become a symbol of convenience more than anything,” says de Rothschild. “The best question to ask is, ‘When did we get so thirsty?’”

The bottles, some 20,000 of them, will fill out the catamaran’s twin hulls. De Rothschild sources them from local recycling centers, but he’ll only select 20 percent of the bottles they bring, and the failure rate of those is 20 percent. Before the crumpled discards make the unlikely leap from trash to boat material they must go through laborious refurbishing.

“I think the recycled bottles will perform just as well as new ones,” says Rose, the boat builder, who really has no idea how new plastic bottles would perform on a 11,000-mile trans-Pacific voyage, “but there is a huge cost involved.”

De Rothschild is an aesthetic. He wants only clear bottles, so first they are sorted by color. Then the labels are peeled, the cigarettes removed, and the bottles washed. “There are a lot of cigarettes,” says Rose. “It’s a dirty job.”

Lastly, comes bottle CPR, where crushed and crinkled bottles are brought firmly to life with a scoop full of dry ice.

I ask bottle technician Malin Ulmer to demonstrate the process. She’s reluctant. “I’ve already burned my hands a lot today,” she says while pouring a scoop of dry ice into the crunched bottle.

The ice sublimates into carbon dioxide gas and the bottle expands. A typical car tire requires around 36 pounds per square inch of pressure for proper inflation; the pressure inside this bottle is around 55 pounds per square inch. Sometimes the bottles explode but the team has done strength tests by running them over with a car. It’s all very scientific.

Once the trashed bottles are properly revived, they’re ready to fit into the plywood model of the hull. Two-liter bottles aren’t particularly hydrodynamic and Rose must outfit the bottom of the hull to make sure the bottles all lie flat. Like much of this process, it’s a tedious exercise of trial and error.

“We can’t design the hull with the basics of naval architecture,” says Rose, “we have to design it for bottle alignment.” Hopefully, the Pacific Ocean won’t be able to tell the difference.

David de Rothschild, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and founder of Adventure Ecology, will depart in Spring 2009 on a 11,000-mile voyage from San Francisco to Sydney (see the route map) in a boat made of plastic bottles. Find out more about the expedition in a feature article by Contributing Editor Paul Kvinta ("Voyage of the Plastiki," October 2008 issue of ADVENTURE). Check in here for updates.

March 10, 2009

Last October, we brought you the story of David de Rothschild, the British explorer who plans to sail 11,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney in a 60-foot catamaran made of used two-liter plastic bottles and other recyclable materials. Readers responded vigorously (read their comments).

Without stepping off of dry ground, de Rothschild and his team have already faced a host of challenges, but now comes the hard part: building, and then sailing, the Plastiki. Departure date is set for the end of April, so over the next several weeks we will take you behind the scenes where, in a vast and otherwise empty pier overlooking San Francisco Bay, one of the world’s most unlikely boats is taking shape. See a photo gallery of the Pier 31 workshop >>

The Plan

David de Rothschild’s plan to sail across the Pacific Ocean, from San Francisco to Sydney in a 60-foot catamaran made of used two-liter plastic bottles, isn’t just an adventure. It’s a crusade. “Our philosophy of throwing everything away has to change,” says de Rothschild. “I want to use the Plastiki as a platform to help people think of waste as a resource.”

Since 2005, de Rothschild’s has used his company Adventure Ecology to promote his expeditions and help teach school children about environmental issues like global warming. With the Plastiki, he hopes to capture a wider audience and do more than just raise awareness. “I don’t want to just highlight the problem,” de Rothschild says, “I want to find solutions.”

The plywood model of Plastiki’s cabin sitting in San Francisco’s Pier 31 illustrates the point. On each leg of the trip, one of the six berths will be set aside for scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who will study topics like ocean acidification, coral bleaching, and marine debris and publish a paper at the end of the trip.

De Rothschild says that the Plastiki will be 100 percent recyclable. The boat’s framework, made of self-reinforced polyethylene terephthalate (PET), demonstrates how unconventional thinking can yield more ecologically sensitive alternatives. “If we have the ability to sail across the Pacific in this—and I have no doubt that we do—it could revolutionize the way people build pleasure boats,” he says. “It’s not going to show up in the America’s Cup, but our vessel could influence the whole industry. That outcome, regardless of if we make it across the Pacific, would be the success of the expedition.”

Through the Sculpt the Future Foundation, the non-profit arm of Adventure Ecology, de Rothschild is also creating the Smart Competition, which he hopes will catalyze people into action. A cash grant will be awarded in five categories—science, marketing, research, art and industrial design, and technology—for solutions that will, as de Rothschild puts it, “beat waste.” Stay tuned for more information on this.

David de Rothschild, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and founder of Adventure Ecology, will depart in Spring 2009 on a 11,000-mile voyage from San Francisco to Sydney (see the route map) in a boat made of plastic bottles. Find out more about the expedition in a feature article by Contributing Editor Paul Kvinta ("Voyage of the Plastiki," October 2008 issue of ADVENTURE). Check in here for updates.

March 09, 2009

Here's a little update from David de Rothschild and our friends working on the Plastiki. Their departure date is now schedule for late April or early May. Stay tuned for updates from our Plastiki correspondent.

Until then, learn about this incredible (dangerous, foolish, and innovative) expedition on the very cool Adventure Ecology website.

David de Rothschild, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and founder of Adventure Ecology, will depart in Spring 2009 on a 7,500-mile voyage from San Francisco to Sydney (see the route map) in a boat made of plastic bottles. Find out more about the expedition in a feature article by Contributing Editor Paul Kvinta ("Voyage of the Plastiki," October 2008 issue of ADVENTURE). Check in here for de Rothschild's dispatches.

January 14, 2009

One thing I find interesting about waste and trash is the way it’s viewed and disposed of tends to sit differently within Western culture than other parts of the world. Outside of the West, there is almost an inherent recycling culture and sense of
responsibility to reuse because waste is fundamentally a resource, either for
financial gain or simply because the materials are reusable.

I think that the most important thing is not to
make plastic the enemy, but to really reassess how we use, dispose, and reuse
it. It comes down to the old cliché of stopping to think before you buy. Can you reuse the bottle that contained the water or soda you drank earlier? The small things can make a
big difference. We can all minimize our impact if we
fundamentally change the way in which we consume. Certain
absurdities—like wrapping perishable vegetables in something that can last five
hundred years in the ground—just don’t make any sense. We
need to go full cycle, and go back to targeting packaging—either minimizing it
or getting rid of it entirely—where it is just not necessary. The biggest change we can make is to rethink our buying habits and create
more demand for positive change.

David de Rothschild, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and founder of Adventure Ecology, will depart in March 2009 on a 7,500-mile voyage from San Francisco to Sydney (see the route map) in a boat made of plastic bottles. Find out more about the expedition in a feature article by Contributing Editor Paul Kvinta ("Voyage of the Plastiki," October 2008 issue of ADVENTURE). Check in here for de Rothschild's dispatches.